VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
October 26, 2026
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
Before the report on abuse, the Vatican published a document dealing with the Catholic Church’s ability to keep its own flock.
Why does Venite ad Me dismiss the role of abuse in the Catholic Church’s ability to grow and sustain itself?
On Thursday, October 22, days before the presentation of the 2026 report from Tutela Minorum, the entity created by Pope Francis to address the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), where Tutela is located in the Vatican structure, published a lengthy document dealing with the “transmission of the faith in an epochal change.”
As per the Vatican’s practice, the document’s title Venite ad Me comes from the Latin original and it references a passage in Matthew’s Gospel (11:28) where Jesus offers his embrace as a chance to rest and recover energies, an invitation to “come to him.” The Catholic Church frequently uses this passage to frame itself as a bridge leading to Christ, especially when promoting missionary and catechetical work.
Oddly enough, despite the overwhelming evidence about the negative effects the clergy sexual abuse crisis has had on that process, Venite ad Me makes no clear reference to the clergy sexual abuse and how missions, catechism and other activities somehow related to the transmission of the faith are settings where abuse frequently happens, goes unpunished and, because of that, leaves an indelible mark of broken trust on the shared experience of many communities.
One only needs to look at the ongoing crisis in Bolivia, where the Jesuit mission in Cochabamba became the setting for large scale sexual abuse, as members of the Society of Jesus with a known record of abuse in Spain and other European countries, would be shipped to Bolivia, as late as in the early years of this century, where they were able to abuse for decades some of the most vulnerable members of rural communities.
One only needs to pay attention to what the Bolivian networks of survivors publish these days in social media, to see not only the extent of the damage caused to individual persons, many of them when they were underage boys or girls, but also the larger, societal effects abuse has on the ability to build social capital, trust, the “cement” that keeps societies resilient, able to mobilize resources and address challenges.
To be clear, Venite ad Me is not blind to the harsh realities religious practice confronts in the 21st century. When one compares it with other documents issued at different points in time by the Vatican’s dependencies, by Popes themselves or by the continental conferences of bishops, as in the case of the 1992 so-called Santo Domingo document, Venite ad Me, seems to be able to raise questions about the future of the Catholic Church, rather than simply regurgitating the alleged superiority of Catholic theology, so common during the second half of John Paul II’s papacy.
Even if it avoids a quantitative take on the issue, perhaps because of how uneven the data sets from Europe and North America are compared to those in Latin America, Africa and Asia, the document seems to be aware that the Catholic Church, as many other Christian churches, is running on the proverbial fumes of survival.
This decline has been thoroughly documented in the United States and Canada by their very complex General Social Surveys and regular polls, as in the case of those by the Pew Research Center in the United States or the Angus Reid Institute in Canada.
The pattern is even starker across large portions of Europe, where religious practice is now something close to an anomaly, as documented by the European Social Survey or the data for the region at the World Values Survey. In Europe, religious practice is nowadays such an anomaly, that it is newsworthy again, as the story linked above proved back in 2025, with data from the United Kingdom and France.
Even Latin America has fallen to this pew-emptying trend. As documented in previous installments of this series, linked before and after this paragraph, this shift is not primarily a mass conversion to Protestantism or other faiths, but a transition to a growing number of “nones,” those declaring no religious affiliation, but not necessarily no religious belief. (1, 2, 3)
Secularization, again
The numbers are grim enough to challenge the late Catholic priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley’s body of scholarly work regarding exceptions to the so-called “secularization theory,” the dominant paradigm to understand the role of religion in public life, but also the underlying assumption of policies sought by governments in Latin America, who justified their own anti-Catholic biases on such theory.
While late 19th century Marxist predictions of secularization never materialized, vast portions of previously predominant Catholic and/or Christian societies in the West and Latin America (the “Far West” as Alain Rouquié, a French diplomat, called the region in the late 20th century), are now, at least, religiously unaffiliated, and religious practice is an individualized hodge-podge, a rather chaotic mixture of different traditions, where affiliation cannot be interpreted the way it was from the late 17th until the early 20th centuries.
Where Greeley’s writings remain as relevant as they were originally, back in the 1990s, is when he described the dismissive attitude of many bishops who, already then, were unwilling to care about what was happening then and bet, as many other leaders of Christian churches, on the vague notion that “only conservative congregations grow.”
While no single study offers the definitive “smoking gun” directly linking clergy abuse to the Catholic Church’s inability to reproduce itself, even the most optimistic assessment of the pervasive effects of the clergy sexual abuse crisis would be forced to acknowledge that abuse and cover-ups severely harm the ability of any religious organization to promote trust in its ability to educate and nurture religious practice.
Venite ad Me indeed includes references to the word abuse. More of them if read in Romance languages. In the French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish versions the word abuse appears in paragraphs 16 and 56. However, in the English and German translations of the document, the only explicit reference happens in paragraph 16, dealing with the misuse of political and religious power. The paragraph reads:
- 16. It is not surprising, then, that such preaching, while easily winning the hearts of ordinary people who find it so close and familiar, disconcerts and, to some extent, unsettles those who wield political and religious power. It is like a light that can reveal every possible use and abuse of that power: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you” (Mt 20:25–26); “Woe also to you lawyers! For you load people with burdens hard to bear” (Lk 11:46).
Treasonous translator?
The key discrepancy happens in paragraph 56. Where the French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish versions explicitly cite “abuse” alongside individualism and other modern maladies, the English version renders the concept as “domination,” while the German translation goes for “Übergriffigkeit,” closer to encroachment or boundary violation than to “Missbrauch,” the most common way to talk about abuse in German, the one used in paragraph 16.
The English translation of paragraph 56 reads:
- 56. The prevailing trend of this unprecedented culture seems to consist in the exaltation of the “sovereignty of the self,” which asserts its autonomy and freedom to determine every aspect of its own existence, subjecting other human beings and the surrounding reality to its own needs. This trend reflects the spread of an increasingly pronounced individualism, which generates separation, division, envy, jealousy, domination, narcissism, and worship of the self.
None of such change happens in French, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish. Given the Vatican’s highly trained, native-speaking translation teams, this choice raises obvious questions: why soften or omit the specific term “abuse” in English or “Missbrauch” in German? This is particularly notable as German and English are primary languages driving contemporary theological (German) and sociological (English) debates on the Catholic Church’s attempts to reform itself.
Oddly enough, what Venite ad Me does is the opposite of what Vatican outlets have done with the clergy sexual abuse crisis. As the story linked after this paragraph proved, Vatican communications in English are usually sharper, with a hint of evidence-based approaches, the opposite of what usually happens in Romance languages, more concerned with other issues.
This time around, the versions in the Germanic languages are the ones affected by editorial choices at odds with the need to address the proverbial “elephant in the room:” clergy sexual abuse shatters trust in religious institutions and practice.
To be clear, unlike some statements one finds nowadays from bishops in the United States and France, among other countries, praising a recent wave in the baptism of adults, some of them with certain public notoriety, Venite ad Me warns about betting big on such conversions.
The risk of betting on conversions
The sustainability of such a model has been questioned by the frequent clashes between some of the high-profile converts who challenge the doctrinal authority of the sitting Pope. One of the most notable was U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance’s attempt to educate Pope Francis on how to interpret the notion of Ordo Amoris when supporting Donald Trump’s inhuman migration policies, as the story linked after told back in 2025.
As Claire Giangravé notes in her report for Religion News Service, the “Vatican document reflects the cautions of Paris-area bishops, who called for a year-long provincial ecclesial assembly in May to address the boom in baptisms.”
She quotes Matthieu Rougé, head of the diocese of Nanterre, suffragan to Paris, and chair of the French bishops’ council for Catholic education, who calls the influx of converts “limited and fragile, and should not give rise to any pride or misplaced triumphalism.”
Rougé seems to be aware of how, despite short-term increases in the number of adult baptisms, their numbers cannot compensate for decades of sustained losses and, perhaps most notably, a decade of scandals hurting both new religious movements affected by abuse and accusations of sectarian practices, now under Vatican intervention, as in the case of the Emmanuel Community (see the story above) as well as what were, at least since the end of the Second World War, two of the most successful global Catholic charities born in France in the second half of the 20th century: Emmaus and L’Arche.
Despite its many accomplishments when pursuing solutions to homelessness in France and Europe, Emmaus was, at least partially, a complex front operation for the large-scale abuse perpetrated by its founder, Abbé Pierre (see the story linked above). So large that over the last couple of weeks new shocking details of its scale have shattered what was left of the trust in that NGO.
The other, L’Arche had a different approach, focusing on work with persons with some kind of disability. Like Emmaus, it had a global and ecumenical reach, with members of other Christian churches and non-believers willing to participate in their activities.
Just like Emmaus, its founder, French-speaking Canadian layperson Jean Vanier, was also exposed as a predator by victims who suffered his attacks from the late 1960s until the mid-2000s, forcing a comeuppance for many of the people involved, one that inevitably brings the realization that such parallel stories of abuse in religious settings end up undermining trust in religious practice.
This is all the more relevant as Venite ad Me emphasizes how one of the features of the “transmission of the faith in an epochal change” process is the fact that the old model, home-based, for the most part matrilineal and sustained by repeated practices learned the way one learns one’s mother tongue, has been broken.
If “transmission of the faith” is increasingly dependent on elective participation, such a process will require improved, more reliable and trustworthy institutional settings. In that regard, a more careful consideration of the mechanisms supporting trust in such settings seems to be absent in the Dicastery’s most recent document.
Stories from the South
This is more relevant as the head of the Dicastery, Argentine Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, has had his own share of awful experiences dealing with the consequences of abuse. As head of the Argentine Archdiocese of La Plata, he had to deal with the aftermath of the suicide of Eduardo Lorenzo, a priest he publicly defended, supported and, according to Argentine sources, protected despite calls from the faithful to dismiss him from ministry.
Fernández was willing to delay a transfer already approved for Lorenzo, probably to avoid a confrontation with the parents of a Catholic school Lorenzo would be expected to minister as pastor of a local parish. Despite that, Fernández kept Lorenzo active as a priest, with little or no restrictions. One must wonder if Fernández’s main concern at the time was to keep the trust of other priests in the diocese and what his assessment was of the potential loss of trust among the faithful in La Plata.
Fernández’s support for Lorenzo was not limited to a one-off statement from one of his underlings in La Plata’s curia. He was willing to concelebrate Mass with Lorenzo on March 24, 2019, despite the fact that, by that time, five victims had already come forward to name Lorenzo as the one who attacked them.
The mass was concelebrated less than nine months before Lorenzo decided to kill himself on December 16, 2019. The suicide happened after a friend of Lorenzo told him about his imminent arrest by the police, as the section “Argentine nightmares” in the story linked after this paragraph told back in 2025.
Lorenzo went to the local offices of Catholic Charities and used a handgun to end his life there. The irony of a Catholic priest with an alleged commitment to support homeless kids ending his life, the sin for which there is no possible pardon, at Cáritas, the institution that summarizes the Catholic Church’s concern for the marginalized, is hard to dismiss.
Even after Lorenzo’s suicide, Fernández seemed to be far more concerned with what happened with the deceased priest than with the victims’ wellbeing. It would be hard to be surprised by the fact that when Pope Francis called his former theological advisor at the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires to become the head of the DDF, victims of abuse in the Archdiocese of La Plata were up in arms, asking Pope Bergoglio to cancel Fernández’s promotion.
Granted, the specific effects of Lorenzo’s abuse of underage homeless males and later his suicide are hard to measure, but it would be rather naïve to assume that there are no consequences in terms of trust and the very ability of the Archdiocese of La Plata to sustain its own growth.
More so when one takes into consideration that Lorenzo’s is hardly the only case in that see, one with an inventory of pending cases, and that has been the setting for the rather unexplained early resignation of Fernández’s successor there. Gabriel Antonio Mestre, now 58, who was the head of that Archdiocese for less than one year, from July 2023 to May 2024.
To be clear, the issue is not Fernández. When compared to other Catholic prelates, Tucho (as he likes to be called by his friends) supported Pope Francis’s timid efforts to tone down the homophobia so common in the Catholic Church. He was willing to defend the notion of informally blessing the unions of “irregular couples,” putting a bullseye on his back for English-language websites like LifeSiteNews, and accusations of heresy from the kind of bishops promoted to their positions by Guinean Cardinal Robert Sarah.
Despite Fernández’s attitude on that issue, his own support for Lorenzo and other Argentine priests with credible accusations of clergy sexual abuse is not out of the ordinary in Latin America, quite the opposite.
Colombian rulings
The issue of trust is more pressing, as there are wings in the Catholic Church still willing to fight off efforts to force it into transparency and accountability. Last Friday, the Colombian Constitutional Court dismissed a series of appeals brought by several Catholic dioceses and orders unwilling to abide by a previous ruling forcing them to provide specific information on the pastoral assignments of bishops, priests (presbyters), deacons and other religious personnel.
The interview with Miguel Ángel Estupiñán, linked after this paragraph, offers the details of the original ruling by the Colombian court, one that was only ratified on Friday, October 23. It is unclear if the most recent ruling will be enough to force the dioceses and orders of the Catholic Church in Colombia to deliver all the information requested originally by Estupiñán and Juan Pablo Barrientos.
The fact that Abelardo de la Espriella, the newly installed President of the country, is a close ally of the most conservative wings of the Catholic Church forces one to wonder if he is going to try to fulfill the Catholic bishops’ wish to avoid delivering the information the Constitutional Court deemed necessary.
One must keep in mind that Ilva Hoyos Castañeda, De la Espriella’s newly appointed minister of Education, is the very embodiment of the complex relation between the Catholic Church and the Colombian political elites.
She has been for the last 20 years or so an advisor of several bishops and of both the Colombian Conference of Bishops and the Council of the Latin American Bishops, the so-called CELAM. As such, she was also a member of Cepromelat, the Latin American correspondent body to Tutela Minorum, as the story linked after this paragraph told before.
An alumna of the global flagship college of Opus Dei in Spain, the Universidad de Navarra, it is unclear what the specifics of her relation with the order-like organization founded by Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer are, but she is by all accounts a key figure in Catholic and Conservative circles in Colombia and Latin America at large.
In that regard, it will be necessary to wait and see what De la Espriella’s reaction to the most recent ruling is, and how Minister Hoyos Castañeda will use her influence to help the Colombian bishops avoid a modicum of accountability and transparency regarding the appointment of their bishops, priests and deacons.
To be clear, once a priest is consecrated as bishop it is relatively easy to track his career, but as proven recently with the head of the Archdiocese of Rabat, Spaniard Cardinal Cristóbal López Romero, see the story linked after this paragraph, his many years as priest in Spain, Paraguay, Bolivia and Morocco are almost impossible to figure out. There is some information in the public record but neither the Catholic dioceses of Paraguay and Bolivia nor the Salesians of Saint John Bosco, the order he has been affiliated with for the last 50 years or so, excel at transparency.
By the way, after the publication of that piece, López Romero announced he would step down as head of the Archdiocese of Rabat, without offering any meaningful detail as to why he would do so next year, when he will reach the canonical age of retirement, 75.
Neither the curia in his current see nor the Vatican have explained why he would do so or whether one must interpret his decision as an implicit acknowledgment that he actually harassed at least two employees in Rabat or if the rumors about previous instances of similar behavior during his years in South America have been confirmed or not. Is it possible to trust in an institution doing that?
Chilean loopholes
Almost at the same time the news from Bogotá emerged, troubling reports from Santiago de Chile were hitting the news services. That day the frontpage of El Mercurio, the voice of the most radical corners of the conservative elites in Chile had as one of its frontpage stories news about how sentences for sexual predators had been reduced through a loophole in administrative channels.
President José Antonio Kast Rist, the grandson of a member of the German Nazi party, passively allowed the reduction of sentences (56 out of 57 in the last year) despite the fact that he declared himself against any change to Chilean criminal law regarding sexual abuse.
The issue is far more complex, as he is the brother of a former subordinate of Chilean super-predator Fernando Karadima. When the scandal broke, Hans Kast Rist was willing to come forward and acknowledge that abuse had happened at the Sacred Heart parish in Santiago de Chile and that it was hardly the old tale of the “abominable lone predator.”
While victims like James Hamilton, José Andrés Murillo and Juan Carlos Cruz Chellew brought the allegations into the public sphere, Hans Kast was one of the few active priests within Karadima’s immediate circle who came forward to ecclesiastical authorities and civil courts to corroborate the accounts of grooming, psychological control and sexual abuse.
He testified to having witnessed inappropriate behavior in 2005, when allegations of abuse against Karadima had already existed in Chile for at least ten years, and formally ratified his statements before the courts during the 2010 investigation.
In his testimony to the 10th Criminal Court of Santiago, Kast advocated for dismantling Karadima’s inner circle of influence, arguing that the environment enabled systemic protection and silence around the parish.
It would be ten years later, 2020, when the President’s brother left the priesthood after 25 years of service. Pope Francis dispensed him from the priesthood alongside Sergio Cobo, another priest linked to the Karadima case.
It is impossible to speculate about President Kast’s reasons to passively allow a reduction of sentences of 56 out of 57 sexual predators through administrative, non-judiciary channels. What is clear is that his passive attitude towards the issue backfired and, after a legislative revolt, he was forced to change course on Friday 23, although it is unclear what will happen with the aforementioned 56 cases.